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The Eyes of Texas Are On a Bullpen

One after another they came out of the Texas Rangers bullpen over the course of one seemingly endless inning. There was Darren O’Day, who acquitted himself fairly well. Then Derek Holland, who couldn’t find the plate. Mark Lowe, who did not pitch very well. Michael Kirkman, who was arguably worse. By the time the two-out, eighth-inning rally was over, the projected Game 4 starter was warming up in the bullpen, AT&T Park was going nuts, Sports Illustrated’s Joe Posnanski was tweeting jokes about obscure 1980s Rangers relievers and the San Francisco Giants had extended a 2-0 lead to 9-0.

EPA

Ron Washington and Mike Maddux discuss their double-secret strategy to start Neftali Feliz in Game 3 of the World Series.

It was almost anticlimactic when the Giants finally wrapped up their second World Series win in as many days Thursday night. The series will move to Texas on Saturday, but it seems a safe bet that sports fans will be talking about this Game 2 for a while. After seven innings of hard-fought baseball, in which the Rangers couldn’t catch a break and Giants starter Matt Cain proved nearly untouchable, the post-game conversation centered less on the Rangers’ bad luck and the Giants’ great pitching than on the Rangers’ benighted bullpen and the one Rangers reliever yet to appear in the series. That would be ace Rangers closer Neftali Feliz, who never so much as threw a warm-up pitch during the backbreaking eighth.

“You’re not allowed to complain about poor luck when you lose by nine runs, or when your relievers give up seven runs in the eighth, or when your relievers walk four hitters in a row,” ESPN’s Rob Neyer writes. “Especially when you use five relievers, and none of them is your best reliever.”

In order to bring the series back to San Francisco, where the Rangers are now the less-than-proud owners of an 0-11 record, Texas will need not so much a miracle as a simple return to form. After all, this team was, before the twin meltdowns of the past two evenings, a heavy favorite in this World Series. “There’s hope in that the Rangers have a lot of righthanded firepower and shouldn’t be as feeble in Games 3 and 4 as they were last night,” Hardball Talk’s Craig Calcaterra writes. “Hope in that, should Colby Lewis falter, Feliz on seven days rest should be able to go five innings or more. Oh, wait. That just brings us back to Washington.”

Things are notably sunnier in the discussion of the Giants, who have suddenly and unexpectedly become the odds-on favorite to win it all. In Sports Illustrated, Posnanski looks at the uncomplicated brilliance of Matt Cain, who has not allowed a single run in 21 1/3 postseason innings. And in the San Francisco Chronicle, John Shea sings the praises of Game 2 offensive star Edgar Renteria, who dropped his two-year imitation of an over-the-hill middle infielder just in time for the most important games of the season.

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It’s often said that New York City is a tough place to play. But it’s also a tough place to be a sports columnist, if you think about it. While sports pincushions like Alex Rodriguez and Carlos Beltran get to leave town during the offseason, the columnists who toil and troll away in the rip-job mines don’t get an offseason. And when one of those columnists slips up, the unofficial ombudsfolk in the city’s blog corps are there to set the record straight.

Still, it’s tough to feel much sympathy for ESPN New York’s Ian O’Connor, who greeted new Mets president Sandy Alderson by instructing him to “say he’s sorry for allowing the monstrous steroid culture to grow fangs on his watch.” For the record, O’Connor is referring to Alderson’s tenure as general manager of the Bash Brothers-era Oakland Athletics two decades ago, not Alderson’s work over the last two years as Major League Baseball’s special ambassador to the Dominican Republic, where he worked on eliminating fraud and steroid issues in that country’s baseball culture.

If O’Connor dealt roughly with Alderson, it was nothing compared to the treatment he got from Mets bloggers. At Amazin’ Avenue, James Kannengieser offers a libertarian-ish defense of Alderson, but Patrick Flood is more direct. “[Alderson] was literally the man MLB hand-picked to fight PED use among amateurs,” Flood writes. “His job was to get steroids out of baseball where they are still most prevalent. So even if you think he did something wrong — and he didn’t — it seems Alderson did his penance already. This isn’t just a stupid knock against Alderson. It’s a wrong one.” Tough town.

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While most Liverpool Football Club fans are surely glad that Tom Hicks and George Gillett finally sold the team – especially those who mounted a multi-front public relations campaign to that end – the Guardian’s Paul Hayward is much less bullish on the team’s purchase by New England Sports Ventures, a group headed by Boston Red Sox owner John Henry. The reason will be familiar to anyone who has ever heard Joe Morgan announce a baseball game. Hayward is convinced that Henry et al. will deploy a stat-savvy, “Moneyball”-style approach at Liverpool. “[Soccer] can’t be reduced to a set of mathematical criteria in the style of baseball or the NFL, though some have already tried,” Hayward writes. “Pitching and batting are easily monitored by results. Speak to any Premier League manager and he will tell you the promising 17-year-old you once saw light up his stadium was cut because he lacked the necessary character to survive in the first-team squad.”

In short, it’s an elegantly turned, British-accented version of the ol’ stats-don’t-measure-heart revanchism easily available in any second-tier sports column here. It should be interesting to watch this particular argument play out again across the pond.

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You’ve got the inimitable Gus Johnson, of course, but for the most part, sportscasting has become a highly professionalized, generally sedate affair. For the most part, anyway. Then there’s also Florida Atlantic University color analyst Dave Van Camp.

The audio of Van Camp’s 90 seconds of on-air mania in last weekend’s FAU game made the rounds Thursday, and it splits the difference between utterly ridiculous, endearingly passionate and call-the-doctor manic. “Lamont is a passionate man, and has been the voice of the program for its entire existence, so cut the man a bit of slack,” SB Nation’s Spencer Hall writes. “After all, it’s not every day you challenge an entire pressbox to a fight in the middle of a game.”

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